Field of the Invention
This invention relates to performing authenticated vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
Background of the Invention
Advances in vehicular technology are revolutionizing the vehicle industry today. Inter-vehicle communication, among many other applications, receives significant attention especially for its traffic safety enhancement features. This trend is exemplified by immense amount of research and industry attention on the use of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication by self-driving vehicles and platooning trucks [32, 26, 22]. Moreover, the United States Department of Transportation announced that the government will investigate passing laws to install V2V communications to all vehicles in the near future to enhance traffic safety [8].
While V2V communication is intended to increase the security and safety of vehicles, it also opens up potential threats for adversaries. The attackers can launch different types of attacks to either greedily benefit themselves or to maliciously cause damage to victims. For example, attackers may transmit bogus information to influence neighboring vehicles to divert other vehicles on the path to gain free path or forge their sensor information to circumvent liabilities for accidents [30]. Platooning vehicles are also vulnerable to collision induction attacks [15]. In addition, Sybil attacks are also possible by using multiple non-existing identities or pseudonyms [11]. Hence, securing inter-vehicular communications is of critical significance that may save users from life-threatening attacks.
In efforts to secure the V2V communications, Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) [9, 25, 23], the de facto V2V communication standard, leverages PKI to authenticate public keys of vehicles. While this solution aims to provide sufficient security guarantees, many attacks are in fact possible. One of the main problems results from location spoofing impersonation attacks. In these attacks, an inside attacker (i.e., a malicious vehicle with a correct certificate), transmits messages with forged locations. For example, an attacker creates a “ghost vehicle” by forging his location to victim vehicles [12]. Similarly, a malicious vehicle in a platoon may impersonate another vehicle's position by forging its location within the platoon [15].
The systems and method disclosed herein provide a robust approach for authenticating vehicles for V2V communication.